Boise-Metro Housing Market (loans, selling a home, employment)

[Torrie]

This article was taken from MSN. It talks about foreclosure rates and explains why they seem high, and the numbers look shocking, but actually it's because the percentages were so small in previous years. I touched on this earlier in the thread(page 3).

Here's a snippet:

"This news will disappoint the gloom-and-doom crew and all those seeking the excitement of financial upheaval. But it may be time to temper our worry and take a closer look at some of the year-over-year foreclosure statistics"

Foreclosure 'crisis' is overblown - MSN Money

[Niners fan]

Originally Posted by Torrie

Not sure what you're asking here or if you're just making a statement... but I'll try and answer.

Building has been slowed down since last year, so this isn't new information. The advantage that owner occupied homes have over new construction is equity! Of course that depends on the age of the home and how long someone has owned it. New construction doesn't always have room to budge in the pricing because most likely they bought and possibly built while materials and land prices were high, so they're trying to recoup that cost.

I was just noting that the market was working as expected. Thanks for your response.

[wireman]

Torrie these three words tell volumes.....Real Estate Agent

Seriously people need to wake up, just because our economic numbers don't indicate a recession is not good enough look around, our economy is a house of cards.
What happened to Bear Sterns why did it happen, the answer to these two questions is why our house of cards is falling.
Who decides we are in a recession, the government and of course they would never cook the books...............right.

[California Carl]

Do you know what the difference is between a depression and a recession?
A recession is when your neighbor has lost their job. A depression is when YOU have lost YOUR JOB!

[Anchorless]

This is quite a shocking chart (note, it has nothing to do with the Boise market in particular, but just interesting information):



United States housing bubble - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Sage of Sagle]

Interesting numbers....I would like to see one of these charts showing Idaho...I bet it would be a lot different...but in which way...that's the question...

[Anchorless]

Aside from a few isolated regions I'm sure prices in Idaho have remained quite steady. I know that Boise has taken off, Eagle, Star, and maybe Kuna. Nampa and Meridian haven't appreciated quite as much.

A lot of the smaller towns close to Sun Valley have sprung - obviously Bellevue many years ago, but now even Shoshone, Gooding, Carey, and Fairfield are getting expensive.

I'm not sure about Northern Idaho, though I'd imagine the CDA and Sandpoint areas have had a sharp increase.

---

From that same link, I found this especially interesting. There is an argument that, apart from the supposed common knowledge that buying a house is a good investment, it might not be quite as good as made out to be:

The investment motive for purchasing homes should not be conflated with the necessity of shelter that housing provides; an economic comparison of the relative costs of owning versus renting the equivalent utility of shelter can be made separately (see boxed text). Over the holding periods of decades, inflation-adjusted house prices have increased less than 1% per year.[9][11] Robert Shiller shows[9] that over long periods, inflation adjusted U.S. home prices increased 0.4% per year from 1890–2004, and 0.7% per year from 1940–2004...Such meager returns are dwarfed by investments in the stock and bond markets. If historic trends hold, it is reasonable to expect home prices to only slightly beat inflation over the long term.

Taken from this rather long Wiki entry: United States housing bubble - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Torrie]

Since this thread is going off topic, I'll ask this....Isn't Wikipedia a not so great resource? My understanding is that anyone can go in and make changes to the facts, so I don't like to quote from it just for that reason. What's you're take on it?

[Anchorless]

Originally Posted by Torrie

Since this thread is going off topic, I'll ask this....Isn't Wikipedia a not so great resource? My understanding is that anyone can go in and make changes to the facts, so I don't like to quote from it just for that reason. What's you're take on it?

Wikipedia itself is not an entirely reliable source - there is a procedure to editing and deleting information, and changes usually go before a panel or forum (of sorts), but yeah...it is not a purely academic source.

That said bias and disinformation is usually pretty well filtered out because it is such a "democratic" consortium of information.

More importantly, it's a great leaping point and compilation of citations/references. If you look at the particular link I cited there are dozens and dozens of citations and references to primary source material.

Much of the information I was particularly citing came from academic sources, by the way. I have found little in regards to the housing bubble and the current housing "crisis" that is more informative and thorough (while being useful and concise) that rivals those Wikipedia links (perhaps some further studies)...

[Niners fan]

Originally Posted by Anchorless

This is quite a shocking chart (note, it has nothing to do with the Boise market in particular, but just interesting information):

<chart>

United States housing bubble - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What I found interesting about the chart was the caption on Wikipedia. If I am reading it correctly it the chart shows actual home prices (inflation adjusted). But the self-assessed values grew at a much faster rate. (When we sold a home a few years ago in So Cal I was surprised to see how much less homes were selling for than what they were listed for.) However, I didn't understand how self-assessed value grew at 2% per year, or 5 times above the actual home prices on the chart. Over a 65 year period (1940-2005) that would be a huge difference between the self-assessed values and actual values.